Friday, May 27, 2016

To help celebrate our wacky day (and reading), we listened to John Lithgow's I'm a Manatee read-aloud song/book.

The book helped inspire us with our creative writing to imagine ourselves as animals, to be even more creative in our thinking. Some children wrote songs and poems today too! Click here for a preview of John Lithgow's reading of the book from iTunes--it's wonderful!

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Families are invited to stop by the store anytime on June 4th to celebrate reading and participate in special events. There will be two mystery readers at 10 AM and 1 PM and the only way to find out who they are is to be there!

Barnes & Noble is also kicking off their Summer Reading Triathlon that day with an opening ceremony at 11 AM featuring one of Breck's favorite local authors, Nancy Carlson. At 2 PM, Breck parent and local author JJ Austrian will be reading and signing books.

There will be special appearances by other familiar folks from Breck throughout the day, and copies of summer reading books will be available for purchase. Join us for a day of fun!

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Many of our students have been excited by the signs around school with teachers, students and even Peef holding books as they "got caught reading!" May is a great time to celebrate reading and encourage children to keep reading throughout the summer. Our students were so inspired by the signs, they asked if we could be in a poster. So we took a few pictures outside as we read in hopes that we might make it on a poster.

We stopped by the Breck sign to spend time with our books. We will see if we make it onto a poster!

It was a beautiful day for reading, so we stayed and read for a while.

To help celebrate reading this month, we will attend an author visit from local author Aimee Bissonette on Monday. She is the author of North Woods Girl and Miss Colfax's Light. You can find out more about her here.

To close out the year in service, we are collecting gently used children's books to help stock Little Free Libraries.

Little Free Libraries are all over the Twin Cities and are a great way to find something new to read! Here is a map of the little free libraries you can find just around Breck!

For a map of other libraries in the metro area or around the globe check here. The teachers will start assembling a pile of books from our collection for donation tomorrow! We are collecting books through June 6. Please bring book donations to the "Service Shelf" near door D. If you would like to assist with delivering books contact Nan Zosel at nan.zosel@breckschool.org.

We read this quote today and thought back to all our self-portraits we have made this year.

Then we examined pictures from nature and explored the idea of line symmetry. We looked at animals, flowers, shells and thought about how some things demonstrate symmetry and some do not. We also looked at a portrait of a girl where the photographer pointed out that faces are typically asymmetrical. In answer to the question, "can we make a face symmetrical," the children used half a photograph taken this year to create a symmetrical self-portrait. This is not an easy task and the results were so wonderful! This was the perfect segue from our MIA trip yesterday and our recent Magic Tree House book about the Mona Lisa.

We titled the portraits "I See Me." They are on the lockers so come check them out!

We had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Minneapolis Institute of Arts on Thursday to help bring our animal and continent study to a close. We started with a tour, looking at pieces from across the globe that featured mammals, insects, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds.

Gold earrings from South America featuring monkeys

Creation piece from Australia with fish

Drum from Australia with reptiles

Sitting in thought in front of a crane screen from Asia

Firespitter mask from Africa featuring elements of a boar, an antelope and more

Caduceus from Europe with snakes and wings

Japanese samurai armor with praying mantis on the helmet

After our tour, we enjoyed a bag lunch and broke into groups to look for animal groups across the whole museum. It was a blast! Thank you to all our parent volunteers! We definitely could not do it without you!